The current Trump-describing meme…

The New Neo Posted on by

…is that he’s turned into a centrist (for example, see this).

But it’s hard to see how he could turn into one, when he always was a mish-mash of competing statements on many subjects. After all, it wasn’t just an objection to his personal style that caused many conservatives to oppose him during the primaries, or even after. It was statements such as his praise for the Canadian health care system, and myriad other examples of not just centrist thought but even in some cases leftist thought.

Any conservative observer of Trump factored that in long ago. Any conservative voter had to consider it during the primaries, but especially after he’d won the nomination. Voting for him constituted a leap into the unknown with a person roundly distrusted. It was only because the alternative—Hillary—was so very dreadful that most conservatives ended up holding their noses and pulling that Trump lever.

The real surprise is that Trump’s been as conservative as he has so far rather than the other way around. I’m not sure I would be surprised by anything Trump does. He is predictable in his unpredictability. But even that is unpredictable because he might suddenly turn consistent, at least for a while.

In legal terms, what is a religion?

The New Neo Posted on by

The question of how a religion is defined has come up many times on this blog in relation to Islam and terrorism. One question sometimes asked is why can’t any group simply declare itself to be a religion and have this be legally so, no matter what the group espouses. In other words, what are the limits of the term “religion”? Are there any criteria for a belief system and its practices to be considered a bona fide religion in the legal sense, with the protection of rights that go along with that designation?

There are many reasons why there is a legal interest in defining religion, because religions get many benefits under our legal system. But the law has traditionally had quite a bit of difficulty defining the term:

Complex interests may depend on the classification of a specific belief system or practice: tax exemptions; religious practices in prison or in the military (e.g., assembly for worship services; possession and sacramental use of various religious physical objects; access to religious literature; wearing of religious garments and jewelry; availability of food required by religious tenets); specific rights of workers, etc. The application of some constitutional and federal legal rules compels courts to delineate the boundaries of the concept of religion.

Legal theorists have made serious attempts to provide an adequate definition of what religion is for First Amendment purposes, and the Supreme Court’s and other federal courts’ efforts have been manifested in a string of cases in the context of the First Amendment as well as in statutory interpretation. These efforts should not be seen as entirely fruitless, but they have not provided a generally accepted legal definition of religion.

In other words, it ain’t easy.

It’s not easy to slog through that linked article, either. But the reader who does get through it should achieve some appreciation of how difficult a task it is to create a legal definition of religion. For example:

If one makes religion a subjective phenomenon determined purely by the individual, one comes into conflict with the social experience that religion generally requires social mediating structures on account of its communal aspects. Through these social structures, religion becomes valuable for the individual and the society integrates the individual’s concerns into social activities and a whole communal experience. The natural need for this integration calls for some social, objective standards of religion beyond the individual’s assertions.

The functional definition practically diminishes the boundaries between religious and nonreligious beliefs in a traditional sense. There remains no valid test for the content of a claimed religious belief and any belief may be seen as religious if it performs the required psychic function in the individual’s life. The merging of the religious and nonreligious spheres, in Sanderson’s view, is in itself unconstitutional (Sanderson 1007). Under a functional definition, no identifiable class could be delineated as the recipient of the protection although the Constitution distinguishes a class under the word “religion” from other classes and provides special protection for that class.

So let’s turn to everybody’s favorite institution, the IRS (especially timely right now). The IRS uses these criteria to define churches (and thus, “religion”) for tax purposes, requiring the presence of some but not all of the following:

Distinct legal existence
Recognized creed and form of worship
Definite and distinct ecclesiastical government
Formal code of doctrine and discipline
Distinct religious history
Membership not associated with any other church or denomination
Organization of ordained ministers
Ordained ministers selected after completing prescribed courses of study
Literature of its own
Established places of worship
Regular congregations
Regular religious services
Sunday schools for the religious instruction of the young
Schools for the preparation of its members

The IRS generally uses a combination of these characteristics, together with other facts and circumstances, to determine whether an organization is considered a church for federal tax purposes

Not all religions meet all the criteria. For example, Quakers don’t have “ordained” ministers who have “completed prescribed courses of study.” They do have pastors, though, who have been “recorded“:

The peculiarly Quaker way of thinking about ministers comes more clearly into focus when one compares the Friends practice of ‘recording’ with the more common practice of ‘ordination.’ In many Christian denominations, one must first be ordained in order to become a minister. To be ordained, the potential minister must first meet a certain set of requirements. Usually, for example, there is a certain level of education one must attain. Some churches also exclude certain categories of people (e.g. women, divorced people, married people) from even entering the process.

As Friends, we reject the idea that some outward trait or experience could qualify someone to be a minister (remember what Fox said about Oxford and Cambridge!). Instead, we believe that anyone may be called to pastoral ministry. Rather than setting human-engineered prerequisites, Quakers have chosen simply to observe those who work as ministers. When it becomes clear that a person is indeed doing pastoral ministry, then we make an official record of what God seems to be doing. That person is “recorded” as a minister among Friends.

And yet I have little doubt that Quakers legally are considered members of a bona fide and protected religion, and their meeting houses are considered as churches in the eyes of the law.

There is something almost intuitive about the definition of a religion, and the societal and legal acceptance of that designation. It is not completely arbitrary. It is not based on just any set of beliefs. Custom and history are part of it. And although there is probably no one element that must always be present for a belief system to be defined as a religion, there are some behaviors that would result in members of a bona fide religion being excluded from protection and even prosecuted for acts that they say are in accord with their religion, but which have been designated by the legal system as criminal.

The classic example is suttee (or sati), a custom among Hindus in India that required a widow to commit suicide by throwing herself on her husband’s funeral pyre. Although initially accepted by the British occupiers, in time they came to criminalize it. Note, though, that the British didn’t declare Hinduism to not be a religion as a result; they demanded that the particular practice of suttee cease. Something similar has occurred in this country regarding Islam and female genital mutilation, a practice which is a federal crime in the US and is criminal under statutes in many states as well.

However, neither suttee nor FMG were or are basic tenets of their respective religions. Their presences in those religions may throw doubt among some people as to the definitions of Hinduism or Islam as religions or churches, but not among most people and not in the legal sense.

Marathon cheaters in China: shades of Rosie

The New Neo Posted on by

Marathon authorities in China are about to start using facial recognition techniques to foil an increasing number of cheaters:

Marathon running is booming in China, where more than 300 races were staged last year as a fitness craze sweeps the country.

But the fear of failure in the age of social media has seen some racers seek any means to ”˜achieve’ a respectable finishing time ”“ including not even taking part in the race.

Which immediately made me think of Rosie. Remember Rosie?:

On…April 21, in 1980, the 26-year-old New Yorker finished first among the marathon’s women runners in near-record time ”” just over two and a half hours…

Legendary runner Kathrine Switzer ”” the first woman ever to officially compete in the Boston Marathon ”” was instantly suspicious when she spoke to Ruiz after the race, which she was covering that day as a television commentator. Switzer asked what Ruiz’s intervals had been, per TIME; Ruiz replied, “What’s an interval?”

Oops.

More deception was revealed when New York Marathon officials looked into Ruiz’s 24th-place finish in that race and discovered that she had used a similar strategy to qualify for the Boston Marathon ”” by taking the subway instead of running most of the course. According to the New York Daily News, Ruiz explained the fact that she was wearing a marathon number by telling fellow subway riders that she had twisted her ankle and just wanted to see the end of the race.

She may not have had much training as a distance runner, but she seemed to have a great deal of practice in bending the truth. Even her application for the New York Marathon was based on a lie: An Associated Press story reveals that she submitted the form after the deadline had passed, but then got “special dispensation” by claiming she had a fatal brain tumor.

Although that article doesn’t say it, I seem to recall that Ruiz had not intended to win, just to place well (as she had in New York). But she miscalculated and won, drawing way too much attention to herself.

Predicting the behavior of the Lone Wolf

The New Neo Posted on by

The always-admirable Richard Fernandez has written this about the Lone Wolf terrorist:

It is a mistake to dismiss the Lone Wolves as “cowardly and depraved”. On the contrary, their tactics require a willingness to die and the intelligent use of abundant dual-use materials that is rarely if ever equaled by the political leadership of the West…

…attack [Lone Wolves] do, surprisingly yet unsurprisingly. It is Western leadership that is more deserving of criticism for turning in such a poor defensive performance despite their vast resource superiority. Obsessed with looking good, timid to the point of inactivity, determined at all costs to proclaim their own virtue, the Western elites have proved singularly incapable of combating their vastly weaker foes. The ritualistic candle-lighting, trite speeches, frightened processions and self-congratulation of the political class are completely ineffective against the laser-like menace of their foes. They haven’t noticed but the voting audience is starting to.

I agree with all of that. But in addition I would add that the West has a huge problem that’s inherent in our entire system of law and punishment. Western law is designed to balance the rights of the community—including its right to protect itself—with the rights of the individual, and we have made a conscious effort that if we must err (and being humans, we are going to err) we’d rather it be on the side of protecting the individual against government tyranny.

The prospect of predicting who will be a Lone Wolf terrorist and stopping that person in time is one that falls into that dilemma. Many Lone Wolves are citizens, born in the West, and even those who are not have certain rights if they are legal immigrants (fewer if they are illegal immigrants, but we have seen that most of these people don’t fall into that category).

Another dilemma the West faces has to do with at what point we decide an act is criminal. Ordinarily, we don’t prosecute thought-crime, and if we were to decide to do so we would have fallen pretty far down the slippery slope. Until they commit a crime, what have Lone Wolves done? Expressed a jihadi thought on Facebook, perhaps? Is that—or should that be—a crime? That’s why some jihadis are caught by using agents posing as jihadis, to be witness to the plotting of the actual crime. But Lone Wolves ordinarily have no confederates and need no confederates, so agents are less likely to be able to trap them.

And then there’s the problem of numbers. At this point, there are so many possible Lone Wolves in each Western country that monitoring them would almost certainly overwhelm the systems. How to distinguish the serious ones from the mere talkers is the question. Recent travel to a country such as Syria would be a huge clue. But you can’t lock someone up for that, you can only monitor that person more closely.

In the case of a Lone Wolf, even monitoring their communications after getting permission to do so from the proper authorities would not necessarily reveal the plotting of a crime, because Lone Wolves don’t have to coordinate with accomplices. Steal a truck, drive down a street and veer off into pedestrians, and you’ve done the deed. It’s a rather brilliant parsimony of terrorist creativity, simple and effective and capable of being executed by almost anyone should they care to do so.

Of course, one might say that so many immigrants from countries known for jihadi terrorist behavior shouldn’t have been let into the West in the first place. That is where the governments of Europe have been very slow on the uptake. But those decisions are inherently difficult, too; who is okay and who is not, and from where (as Trump found out recently with his EO and its courtroom fate so far). And many of the people involved (the parents or grandparents of today’s Lone Wolves, for example) emigrated to the West long ago. Their children and/or grandchildren are native-born citizens, or at least legal residents (European countries differ on that score).

The cat is out of the bag. Pandora’s box has been opened. The horse has left the barn. The die has been cast. Take whatever expression you want, the point is that solutions are far from easy and some of the more effective-seeming ones would compromise our entire legal system and our liberties. And even then there would be no guarantee that Lone Wolves would be caught in time.

Michael Totten on Europe: things fall apart

The New Neo Posted on by

This article by Michael Totten is a review of a book by James Kirchick entitled The End of Europe: Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age. The most important line of the Totten article is “the West is losing the will to defend itself.”

But we already know that.

More about what’s happening in Europe:

“The Visegrad Four regional alliance of Hungary, Poland, the Czech Republic, and Slovakia now shows signs of developing into a populist, neo-authoritarian rump within the EU,” Kirchick writes. Czech President MiloÅ¡ Zeman is the staunchest supporter of Vladimir Putin on the continent, even going so far as to deny, in the style of Baghdad Bob, that Russia invaded Ukraine at all. His campaign, not coincidentally, was funded by the Russian energy company Lukoil.

Now would be the time for Western Europe to straighten its spine. Instead, it’s doing the opposite.

And the situation, as well as the reaction to it, is more potentially problematic and extreme in Europe than here:

Britain, though, has a serious problem of its own apart from its fateful Brexit decision: the country’s political center has all but collapsed…

What’s happening in the United States is just one act in an epic drama unfolding across the entire Western world. That drama could take a much darker turn in Europe, where the far-left and far-right draw upon a relatively recent fascist and communist past that is entirely absent in the United States.

The “migrant” problem is worse in Europe, too:

“What made Merkel’s decision to open Europe’s gates to an untold number of Muslim migrants so problematic,” Kirchick writes, “is that the continent has done such a poor job integrating the Muslims who already live there.” Even the European-born children of immigrants tend to be thought of and treated as guests in Europe rather than permanent residents and citizens…

Europe, like anywhere else in the world, needs a middle path between open borders and Fortress Europe, but the political parties of the mainstream right as well as the left have spent years branding anyone who utters even a meek protest as racist. Voters who are disturbed that a million refugees can arrive at their door all at once because a foreign head of state said it’s okay have only one voting booth option””the far-right.

Yeats said it about a century ago:

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Passover: a celebration of freedom

The New Neo Posted on by

[NOTE: This is a slightly edited repeat of a previous post.]

Monday evening was the beginning of the Jewish holiday Passover.

In recent years whenever I’ve attended a Seder, I’ve been impressed by the fact that Passover is a religious holiday dedicated to an idea that’s not really primarily religious: freedom. Yes, it’s about a particular historical (or perhaps legendary) event: the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in Egypt. But the Seder ceremony makes clear that, important though that specific event may be, freedom itself is also being celebrated.

Offhand, I can’t think of another religious holiday that takes the trouble to celebrate freedom. Nations certainly do: there’s our own Fourth of July, France’s Bastille Day, and various other independence days around the world. But these are secular holidays rather than religious ones.

For those who’ve never been to a Seder ceremony, I suggest attending one (and these days it’s easier, since they are usually a lot shorter and more varied than in the past). A Seder is an amazing experience, a sort of dramatic acting out complete with symbols and lots of audience participation. Part of its power is that events aren’t placed totally in the past tense and regarded as ancient and distant occurrences; rather, the participants are specifically instructed to act as though it is they themselves who were slaves in Egypt, and they themselves who were given the gift of freedom, saying:

“This year we are slaves; next year we will be free people…”

Passover acknowledges that freedom (and liberty, not exactly the same thing but related) is an exceedingly important human desire and need. That same idea is present in the Declaration of Independence (which, interestingly enough, also cites the Creator):

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.

It is ironic, of course, that when that Declaration was written, slavery was allowed in the United States. That was rectified, but only after great struggle, which goes to show how wide the gap often is between rhetoric and reality, and how difficult freedom is to achieve. And it comes as no surprise, either, that the Passover story appealed to slaves in America when they heard about it; witness the lyrics of “Let My People Go.”

Yes, the path to freedom is far from easy, and there are always those who would like to take it away. Sometimes an election merely means “one person, one vote, one time,” if human and civil rights are not protected by a constitution that guarantees them, and by a populace dedicated to defending them at almost all costs. Wars of liberation only give an opportunity for liberty, they do not guarantee it, and what we’ve observed in recent years has been the difficult and sometimes failed task of attempting to secure it in a place with no such tradition, and with neighbors dedicated to its obliteration.

We’ve also seen threats to liberty in our own country, despite its long tradition of liberty and the importance Americans used to place on it. I fear those days may be over.

Sometimes those who are against liberty are religious, like the mullahs. Sometimes they are secular, like the Communists. Sometimes they are cynical and power-mad; sometimes they are idealists who don’t realize that human beings were not made to conform to their rigid notions of the perfect world, and that attempts to force them to do so seem to inevitably end in horrific tyranny, and that this is no coincidence.

As one of my favorite authors Kundera wrote, in his Book of Laughter and Forgetting:

…human beings have always aspired to an idyll, a garden where nightingales sing, a realm of har­mony where the world does not rise up as a stranger against man nor man against other men, where the world and all its people are molded from a single stock and the fire lighting up the heavens is the fire burning in the hearts of men, where every man is a note in a magnificent Bach fugue and anyone who refuses his note is a mere black dot, useless and meaningless, easily caught and squashed between the fingers like an insect.”

Note the seamless progression from lyricism to violence: no matter if it begins in idealistic dreams of an idyll, the relinquishment of freedom to further that dream will end with humans being crushed like insects.

History has borne that out, I’m afraid. That’s one of the reasons the people of Eastern Europe have been more inclined to ally themselves recently with the US than those of Western Europe have—the former have only recently come out from under the Soviet yoke of being regarded as those small black and meaningless dots in the huge Communist “idyll.”

Dostoevsky did a great deal of thinking about freedom as well. In his cryptic and mysterious Grand Inquisitor, a lengthy chapter from The Brothers Karamazov, he imagined a Second Coming. But this is a Second Coming in which the Grand Inquisitor rejects what Dostoevsky sees as Jesus’s message of freedom:

Oh, never, never can [people] feed themselves without us [the Inquisitors and controllers]! No science will give them bread so long as they remain free. In the end they will lay their freedom at our feet, and say to us, “Make us your slaves, but feed us.” They will understand themselves, at last, that freedom and bread enough for all are inconceivable together, for never, never will they be able to share between them! They will be convinced, too, that they can never be free, for they are weak, vicious, worthless, and rebellious. Thou didst promise them the bread of Heaven, but, I repeat again, can it compare with earthly bread in the eyes of the weak, ever sinful and ignoble race of man?

Freedom vs. bread is a false dichotomy. Dostoevsky was writing before the Soviets came to power, but now we have learned that lack of freedom, and a “planned” economy, is certainly no guarantee of bread (just ask the Ukrainians).

Is freedom a “basic need,” then? Ask, also, the Vietnamese “boat people.” And then ask them what they think of John Kerry’s assertion, during his 1971 Senate testimony, that they didn’t care what sort of government they had as long as their other “basic needs” were met:

We found most people didn’t even know the difference between communism and democracy. They only wanted to work in rice paddies without helicopters strafing them and bombs with napalm burning their villages and tearing their country apart…

So that when we in fact state, let us say, that we will have a ceasefire or have a coalition government, most of the 2 million men you often hear quoted under arms, most of whom are regional popular reconnaissance forces, which is to say militia, and a very poor militia at that, will simply lay down their arms, if they haven’t done so already, and not fight. And I think you will find they will respond to whatever government evolves which answers their needs, and those needs quite simply are to be fed, to bury their dead in plots where their ancestors lived, to be allowed to extend their culture, to try and exist as human beings. And I think that is what will happen…

I think that politically, historically, the one thing that people try to do, that society is structured on as a whole, is an attempt to satisfy their felt needs, and you can satisfy those needs with almost any kind of political structure, giving it one name or the other. In this name it is democratic; in others it is communism; in others it is benevolent dictatorship. As long as those needs are satisfied, that structure will exist.

I beg to differ. I think there’s another very basic need, one that perhaps can only really be appreciated when it is lost: liberty.

Happy Passover!

Questions raised by the United incident

The New Neo Posted on by

The world seems to be abuzz about the passenger-ejection incident on United.

Why did this tap into so much reaction? One reason is that a lot of people are fed up with crowded airplanes, long lines, the TSA (which probably was not a prime mover in this particular event), and what seems like arbitrary behavior by airlines. Whether these incidents are common or not in your experience depends on how often you fly, on what routes, and on what airlines.

My personal opinion is that United handled it stupidly and should have offered more money for the switch, and probably would have gotten some volunteers. But I also think that airlines must reserve the right to remove unruly or uncooperative passengers.

Note that last bit: uncooperative. When you get on an airplane, unfortunately you temporarily surrender some rights. I say “temporarily” because you don’t actually surrender your liberty or your rights: you can always sue the airline later if they’ve mistreated you or treated you unfairly. But in the moment, the need to preserve some sort of order on the plane takes precedent. It’s a question of common sense, too, as in dealing with a police stop.

In other words, if they tell you you have to get off a plane, you better get off the plane and iron it out later. Oh, you can object, and you can say why you need to get to your destination. You can certainly plead your case. But if the answer is “No, you must deplane,” don’t make them drag you off.

Because what else would you recommend they do with a passenger who won’t get off when the airline says he/she must? The airline’s request may have been arbitrary, or even wrong and unjustified, but once the passenger has stood his or her ground in the face of it, that passenger has demonstrated the potential to be a problem once the plane is in the air.

You may not like it. I certainly don’t like it. But I consider that when I’m flying I have temporarily surrendered at least some of my autonomy, and the airline, its employees, and the TSA become the bosses for a while. If they say remove my shoes in line, I do. If they say I have to get off a plane (and fortunately they’ve never said it), I do. If they say I must change seats (also fortunately something I’ve never been asked to do) I’ll do it. I might and probably would protest and explain why it’s a bad idea, but if they insist, I’m going to do it. I’ll try to get them to pay the consequences later.

There’s a limit. I wouldn’t hurt another passenger if they asked. I wouldn’t commit a crime. But any request that’s in their bailiwick is something with which I’ll probably be complying, although not without protest and not without a later attempt to get legal or financial redress.

The bottom line is that airlines must be able to determine who stays on that plane and who leaves. If an airline’s actions in doing so are unfair or unreasonable, iron it out later, if necessary by a lawsuit. The airline should never need to physically hurt someone unless that person is physically resisting to the point of combat. But sometimes people will need to be carried out forcibly, and that is the airline’s decision. Uncooperative passengers are potentially a problem later on, and if the airline doesn’t want to risk that possibility it doesn’t have to. But the airline will bear the consequences for how it treats that person if the decision was a bad one or if it was handled badly—the PR consequences, the economic consequences, and the legal consequences.

A little background—about 30 years ago, my husband was on a plane on which a passenger (who apparently had either been drinking or doing some drugs) became unruly and somewhat aggressive while in flight. My husband was one of two or three passengers who rushed up to subdue the other passenger, holding him down in the aisle for the rest of the flight until after the plane landed. It was pretty harrowing, although we got a few free tickets from the airline afterward. Airlines are trying to prevent that sort of thing from happening, and they are trying to predict who might become unruly. Unless they’re throwing off people quite often (which does not appear to be the case with United), it’s a judgement call that’s sometimes not easy to make. Should they err on the side of caution or not? In the case of the recent United incident, once the man refused, and kept refusing—whether his refusal was reasonable or not, and whether the airline’s request had been reasonable or not—he became a potentially unruly and uncooperative passenger, and the airline had to make a decision about what to do.

My guess is that, once he dug in with his refusal, it seems to have become an issue not just of bumping the guy off the flight, but also of how to deal with a noncompliant passenger. The airline may not have wanted to risk a further incident with him if they let him stay on the plane.

I don’t know the whole story of what actually happened here. But I do know that videos rarely tell the whole story.

And is this history of the passenger relevant? Perhaps not, and certainly not in the legal sense. What’s legally relevant is how each party behaved and why, and what are the rules about airline and passenger behavior in such circumstances. That remains to be determined here. And of course, intentionally roughing up a passenger who was passively resisting and not actively and physically belligerent would almost certainly be grounds for a successful lawsuit. The use of excessive force would not be justified, and that may have occurred in this incident.

The case has become a lightning rod for all the frustration people feel about other incidents they’ve witnessed or experienced in which they felt unjustly or disrespectfully treated while traveling. As for me, I remember when women almost never boarded airplanes in slacks but wore dresses instead, when there were almost always plenty of empty seats, and when everybody was almost unfailingly polite. These days are gone, gone, gone.

Audio books and me

The New Neo Posted on by

In this thread from Saturday, quite a few people rhapsodized on how much they like audio books, and they recommended them to me. I’ve written before about my problems with auditory learning (see this and this), but now I’d like to talk (correction: write) about my problems with recorded books.

Years ago when my arm injuries were at their peak, I couldn’t even hold a book or turn the pages for very long. That was before the days of Kindle, and I experimented with every book-holding gadget that was made at the time. None of them worked for me, because they all involved too much arm labor. At the time, even a few minutes was too much.

But I missed my books terribly. After all, when your activities are as markedly limited as mine were then, books can become more important than ever for the already-bookish. So I went to what you’d think would be the natural alternative, Books on Tape (as it was quaintly called at the time).

It was a total bust for me. Within minutes of beginning to listen, my mind would go on walkabout. Daydreaming, wandering, cogitating, woolgathering—the drift would inevitably happen. Later, I’d find myself coming to without a clue as to where I’d left off.

When you stop reading a book you know you’re doing it, and you can place a bookmark there to note the exact spot to come back to when you resume reading. No such luck in finding where you’re stopped listening to an audio book. I had no idea where I’d stopped concentrating; no idea where I’d begun to drift, and anyway it wouldn’t really help to find the spot because I’ve just do it again in fairly short order, even though I’d resolve not to.

It didn’t seem to matter what the subject was. Fiction or non, biography or novel, all were merely a jumping-off point for me when I listened to them. When I read a book I usually am sharp and focused, as well as quick. But listening seemed to bring out some stubborn resistant part of me, or perhaps it was a real inability to process information that way or at least to attend to it.

That had been a big problem for me in my school days—not a learning problem, because I was an excellent student, and almost all the information could also be accessed in books—but an attention problem. I would sit at my desk, uncomfortable and bored, eyes and mind glazing over at the drone drone drone of most of my teachers. It was particularly acute during reading time, when the teacher would often call on the slowest of readers to read aloud.

I was embarrassed for them as they slowly and stumblingly read the passage in our little readers (in which the stories were already stupifyingly dull). I had sympathy for the slow readers, at least in the abstract. But it set my teeth on edge to have to listen as their humiliation and suffering went on and on and on. Later, in college, I was puzzled by lecture halls. Why should I have to sit there for an hour listening to a lecture when I could have read it in a few minutes if the text had been given me?

There’s a clue there to some of the problem: reading a text aloud takes longer than just reading it to oneself, and I apparently wasn’t very patient with that process. I don’t think that’s the whole explanation (which remains a mystery), but it may be part of it.

I was one of those people who sat at the very back of the room during lectures, swinging my leg restlessly, doodling and smoking.

There were only a few classes in college that I liked. They were almost always small, and involved discussions rather than lectures—such as the one on poetry, where the professor and I would schmooze about Robert Frost while the rest of the class yawned.

So audio books are not a good match for me. The only one I’ve ever listened to successfully was someone who read James Herriot’s short stories with zest, verve, and appropriate accents. Those tales are already remarkably entertaining, though, and they’re not long. The person reading them on that particular recording was able to turn them into amusing little radio plays, and my attention never wavered. But that was a rare phenomenon for me in the world of book listening.

So although I see the point of audio books in terms of practicality and ease, for me it just doesn’t seem to work. It’s an odd quirk of mine, since I have no problem listening to normal speech in the real world. If you talk to me, I’ll listen intently. I might even remember what you said longer than another listener might remember it. I’ll pick up on nuances of expression. I usually can tell a lot about people from their speech and tone, even the way they answer the phone—sad, tired, half-asleep, lying, telling the truth. But lectures and books seem to erect a wall between me and the speaker, the talk turns into a drone, and before I know it my mind is elsewhere.

And then there’s my problem with cartoons…

Mostly quiet on the southern front

The New Neo Posted on by

[Hat tip: commenter “DNW”]

Trump may have lost his EO battle with the courts for now, and the sanctuary city conflict is probably going to heat up. But he’s been winning a quieter battle (so far) on the southern border, without even needing to build a wall:

Migration experts, Border Patrol agents and advocates offer plenty of reasons for the sharp decline in people crossing over, from President Trump’s aggressive stance on securing the border and media coverage of recent immigration raids to heightened security on Mexico’s southern border. A rise in smuggling fees could also be a factor.

“We don’t really have a normal anymore,” said Castro, who has worked for Customs and Border Protection for nearly 20 years. She insists agents are not doing anything differently; the Trump administration’s executive orders are simply enforcing laws already on the books.

“Are you going to risk a 1,000-mile journey and pay $8,000 to be smuggled if you’re not sure you’ll get to stay?” Castro said, offering a reason she thinks fewer asylum seekers are crossing over. “I wouldn’t.”

Decrease rewarda for a behavior and up the risks, and you’ll get less of the behavior.